NOTE: THE DEFINING
GENERATION is a project begun by Doug and Pam Sterner in 2002 and
completed in 2006. Initially is was prepared for publication as a book,
however with their changing focus to development of a database of military
awards, was postponed indefinitely so they could concentrate on that
larger, more important work. The stories found herein however, need to be
shared, and they have consented to make this compilation available in this
format. While each story can stand alone, it is recommended that for
continuity, readers will be best served by reading the chapters
sequentially from first to last.

The Defining
Generation

-

Defining the Role of
the Sexes

Women in Military Service

"I
think that women should have the opportunity to serve where they
are trained, where they are qualified, and perform as citizens
of the United States in national security."

"I
wanted to be when I grew up was - in charge."

Brigadier
General Wilma Vaught (USAF, Ret.)

THE
U.S. Army's "Soldier's Medal" while low in precedence, ranking
below the Silver Star, Legion of Merit and even the Distinguished Flying
Cross, is one of the most respected military medals. Awarded for heroism
by those serving with the Army in any capacity that involves the voluntary
risk of life under conditions other than those of conflict with an
opposing armed force, it has been presented with less frequency than any
other Valor award with the sole exception of the Medal of Honor. The
refusal of an Army commander to award Karen Offutt the Soldier's Medal in
1970 because "we don't award them to women" is both tragic and
telling.

Despite the fact that
during the Vietnam War the U.S. Military was "color blind" and
became perhaps the leader in equal opportunity regardless of race, it
remained one of the most resistant sub-sets of American culture where
equality for women was concerned. That gender bias was not only a
traditional one based upon flawed stereotyping of women who wanted to
serve their nation, it was based in statute. Even as Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law granting equal opportunity in
employment and prohibiting discriminatory actions against "…any
individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national
origin," under United States Law:

§No more than 2% of the total military
force could be comprised of women.

§Women given officers' commissions
could comprise no more than 10% of the total number of women in the Armed
Forces.

§A cap was placed on the promotion of
women above paygrade O-3 (Captain in the Army, Lieutenant in the Navy).

§No woman serving as director of the
WACs, WAVEs, or WAFs was allowed promotion above paygrade O-5 (Lieutenant
Colonel in the Army and Commander in the Navy). Women Marines were allowed
nothing higher than the temporary paygrade O-6 (Colonel). Women of ALL
services were specifically barred from promotion to General Officer.

§By policy, women were precluded from
having command authority over men.

§Women were specifically barred from
serving aboard Navy vessels except for certain hospital ships and
specified transports and were further prohibited from duty in combat
aircraft engaged in combat missions.

§Women were barred from participation
in campus ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) programs, as well as from
appointments to the Army, Navy or Air Force Academies.

§Women were denied spousal benefits for
their husband unless the he depended on his wife for more than 50 percent
of his support.

§The services were authorized to
automatically discharge any woman, married or single, who became pregnant.
This provision extended to a military woman who became a parent by either
adoption or by marriage to a man who had a minor child/stepchild that
resided in the family home at least 30 days a year.

The concept of women
serving in the military, even in combat, was a nearly two-century-old
practice that was still seeking proper recognition and official sanction
in the 1960s. The evolution of women in military service from a sheltered
auxiliary to full military status made limited strides during the Vietnam
War era, but the impact of those strides would not reach fruition until
after the war was over.

As noted earlier, the
history of American women in combat can at the least be traced back to of
the first major battles of the American Revolution. Margaret Cochran
Corbin was NOT a soldier but neither was she a woman who had assumed the
garb and name of a man in order to serve as. Rather she was the wife of a
soldier who, when he fell mortally wounded, single-handedly continued to
fire her cannon until she was wounded and captured. In the parlance of
later generations she was not a soldier but an AUXILLARY to the military,
despite the fact that she fought as well and "bled as red" as
did those men with whom she served.

It has also been noted that
women served valiantly in the hospitals and on the battlefields of the
Civil War, some disguised as men, some as spies, but most in support roles
as civilian nurses. It was the latter that paved the way for expanding
opportunities in the United States military. During the Spanish-American
war (1898) the Army contracted with civilian women to serve as nurses to
soldiers both at home and abroad. Annie Wheeler, daughter of General Fighting
Joe Wheeler, accompanied her father who in the Civil War became
legendary as a Confederate Cavalry officer, to Cuba where he commanded
U.S. Army forces in their battles with the Spanish. Civil War heroine
Clara Barton put Annie in charge of a newly organized hospital where her
work with sick and wounded soldiers earned her the title "Angel of
Santiago." The way she and others like her in that brief war served
with a distinction that endeared them to the fighting soldiers paved the
way for other women to follow.

The value of nurses to sick
or wounded men of the military was validated by those women who had served
as civilian contract nurses during the Spanish-American War, and gave
ample reason in 1901 to at last officially welcome women into the Army
with establishment of the Army Nurse Corps. Seven years later the Navy
enlisted 20 women into its own Nurse Corps and, by the time the Untied
States entered World War I nearly 5,000 women were on active duty in the
Army. When the United States began calling up men for service in Europe in
1917, women were also actively recruited for volunteer service. Though
most of the more than 21,000 Army nurses who served during that war were
assigned to state-side hospitals or hospital ships on the seas, 10,000
served in England or at front-line hospitals in France.

Though these women were not
assigned to combat roles they certainly faced the dangers of the combat
zone. On August 17, 1917, six months before soldiers of the A.E.F.
(American Expeditionary Force) began facing their first major, sustained
combat, German aircraft bombed British Casualty Clearing Station No. 61 in
France. U.S. Army Reserve Nurse Beatrice MacDonald tended the wounded
despite the deadly enemy attack until she was herself wounded. A comrade,
Reserve Nurse Helen Grace McClelland "cared for her when wounded,
(and) stopped the hemorrhage from her wounds under fire caused by bombs
from German aeroplanes." That quote is from the Award of the
Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor, to
McClelland. A DSC was also awarded to Beatrice MacDonald and the two
became the first of FOUR Nurses to receive that high honor in World War I.
The other two nurses so decorated for actions the following year were Army
Reserve Nurse Isabelle Stambaugh and Red Cross Nurse Miss Jane Jeffery.
Both were wounded by enemy fire.

During World War I Lenah
Sutcliff Higbee was awarded the Navy's second highest medal the Navy Cross
"for distinguished service in the line of her profession and unusual
and conspicuous devotion to duty as superintendent of the Navy Nurse
Corps." During World War II the U.S.S. Higbee was commissioned
in her honor, the first American warship named in honor of a woman.

More than 250 Army nurses
died on active duty during World War I and 19 members of the Navy Nurse
Corps also paid the supreme sacrifice. Not all of the deaths were combat
related, however. Most of the Navy Nurse Corps' casualties came during the
Influenza Epidemic of 1918 - 1919. Navy Reserve Nurses Edna Place, Marie
Louise Hidell, and Lilian M. Murphy were posthumously awarded the Navy
Cross for courageously performing their duties to treat influenza-stricken
soldiers until the disease also claimed their lives.

One vastly overlooked role
played by women in World War I was the job of the so-called "Hello
Girls" who were the first American women ever recruited for
non-medical service in the Army. In 1917 General John J. Pershing,
commander of the A.E.F., advertised in American newspaper for bi-lingual
women to apply for service as Army switchboard operators. More than 7,000
women volunteered and 450 of them were selected and received military and
Signal Corps training. They learned basic military radio procedures at
Camp Franklin, Maryland (now Fort Meade). After training, the women
purchased their Army regulation uniforms complete with "U.S."
brass, Signal Corps crests, and "dog tags." Arm patches
designating positions were issued. In the spring of 1918 when the first
thirty-three operators deployed to Europe they were issued gas masks and
steel helmets.[i]

After the Armistice and
upon their return to the United States, these women applied for their
honorable discharges. Because all Army regulations were worded in the
"male" gender, they were denied veterans status. The Army
considered them civilians working on a contract basis for the Army. This
perplexed the women because they had been required to wear regulation
uniforms, they were sworn into service and had to follow all Army
regulations. The Chief Telephone Operator, Grace Banker, even received the
Distinguished Service Medal from Congress. Even so, in a move typical of
the slight so often forced upon women who had served in time of war only
to be subsequently overlooked, when those who had served applied for their
honorable discharges, the "Hello Girls" were denied veterans
status.*

In addition to the more
than 21,000 Army and Navy nurses and the 450 "Hello Girls", some
13,000 civilian women worked for the military in clerical and other
support positions during World War I. Their contribution did not go
completely unnoticed, and American society felt something of a debt to
women for how they had acquitted themselves. Many historians believe the
successful passage in 1921 of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights
to women was in no small part successful because of women who proved their
importance during the war.

In the peaceful interim
between the world wars (1919 - 1941) the Nurse Corps remained an integral
part of the American military, although greatly reduced in size. During
that interim, in 1920, the Army formally commissioned its nurses as
officers, though the Navy did not follow suit until World War II. By early
1941 there were fewer than 7,000 women in the Army Nurse Corps and fewer
than 500 in the Navy Nurse Corps, but with prospects for war looming,
recruitment began to swell their ranks. When Japanese bombs and torpedoes
rained down on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there were eighty-two
nurses serving at the three hospitals in Hawaii, numbering them among the
first veterans of that war. Another 105 nurses were serving in the
Philippine Islands and at Guam.

Two days after the attack
on Pearl Harbor the American outpost at Guam was forced to surrender to
the Japanese. The five Navy nurses assigned to that station became
Prisoners of War and were held by the Japanese until repatriation in
August 1942. For the nurses in the Philippines conditions became far
worse. Though valiant efforts were made to evacuate the nurses before
Bataan and Corregidor fell, 67 Army nurses and 11 Navy Nurses were
captured and forced to survive the war in Japanese prison camps. In the
European Theater Lieutenant Reba Whittle became a German POW when the
airplane on which she was serving in an air evacuation mission was shot
down in September 1944.

Army Nurses received 1,619
medals, citations, and commendations during the war, reflecting the
courage and dedication of all who served. Sixteen medals were awarded
posthumously to nurses who died as a result of enemy fire. These included
6 nurses who died at Anzio, 6 who died when the Hospital Ship Comfort was
attacked by a Japanese suicide plane, and 4 flight nurses. Thirteen other
flight nurses died in weather-related crashes while on duty. Overall, 201
nurses died while serving in the Army during the war.[ii]
The Navy Nurse Corps also suffered its share of casualties while its
members earned numerous combat and meritorious service awards as well.

In all, beyond the 6
million civilian "Rosies" who worked in military production
factories, nearly half-a-million women served inside the Army, Army Air
Force, Navy and Marines during the war. While 75,000 of them served inside
the two Nurse Corps' (60,000 Army and 14,000 Navy), six times that number
served in clerical, supply, transportation and even flight roles as
members of the military forces.

During World War I, as
early as 1917, Britain established a Women's Army Auxiliary Corps to
enlist women for military service. Their duties were separated into four
fields of endeavor: cooking, clerical, mechanical, and miscellaneous.
Following the war women continued to serve in the armed forces of England,
a pattern adopted by the United States in controversial legislation
finally signed by President Roosevelt on May 15, 1941.

Early in 1941 Congresswoman
Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts met with General George C. Marshall,
the Army's Chief of Staff, and informed him that she intended to introduce
a bill to establish an Army women's corps, separate and distinct from the
existing Army Nurse Corps. Rogers believed the women's corps should be a
part of the Army so that women would receive equal pay, pension, and
disability benefits, in contrast to those who had served in the previous
war but been denied veterans status or benefits. The opposition perhaps is
best seen in the comments of one Congressman who noted, "Who will
then do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to
which every woman has devoted herself; who will nurture the
children?"

A compromise version of
Rogers
' bill finally passed the House by a vote of 249 to 86, and on
May 14, 1941
, itpassed the Senate 38 to
27. The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was established the following
day when the President signed the bill. The successful legislation
however, fell far short of what Congresswoman Rogers had envisioned. The
women's service was NOT a part of the Army, but auxiliary thereto.
Officers in the WAAC were noted by grade, First Grade Officer, Second
Grade Officer, etc. Pay and benefits for those who volunteered fell far
short of that given to male counterparts in the Army.

Air power was destined to
play a critical role during World War II and on
September 14, 1942
, General Henry Arnold approved a program to recruit, train, and utilize
women as pilots to ferry aircraft in non-combat theaters in order to free
up male pilots for combat missions. Under the direction of Jacqueline Jackie
Cochran, who had pitched just such an idea to the First Lady three years
earlier, the Army Air Force established the Women's Flying Training
Detachment (WFTD) to teach women to fly. Simultaneous the Women's
Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) was born under the leadership of Nancy
H. Love. Despite the shortcomings in terms of advancing the role of women
in military, the two programs were a quantum leap demonstrating a new
confidence in women to master the skills needed to pilot large bomber
airplanes.

Not to be outdone by the
Army, however with much the same opposition from those who resisted the
move to bring women into the military, in the summer of 1942 the Navy
established its own female force, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency
Service (WAVES). The title alone left little illusion that the move was
nothing more than a temporary measure to meet the demands of the current
war however, and in general it was assumed that the WAVES would be
disbanded when the war ended. With that in mind and with tongue in cheek,
some of them took to defining the acronym for their organization
"Women are Very Essential Sometimes."

Unlike the Army's WAAC and
WFTD/WAFS however, Navy WAVES were NOT an auxiliary to the Navy, but were
accepted directly into service. They served and were treated for the most
part, as their male counterparts in the U.S. Naval Reserve. Such a
progressive an attitude aside, prejudice lingered in a Navy that still
relegated Black men to menial tasks in the galley. Not until 1944 were
Black women accepted into the WAVES. Conversely however, although Black
women were welcomed into the Army's auxiliaries from their formation, they
were assigned to segregated all-Black units. It was, perhaps, the only
place in early WWII military where men and women served on a comparable
basis, although not in a positive manner.**

Women served in support
roles in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War I and the value of their
service was not lost on the Marine Corps Commandant who, in February 1943,
began welcoming women into the World War II the Marine Corps. Under the
leadership of Major Ruth Cheney Streeter, a 47-year old mother of four,
women of the Marine Corps Women's Reserve (MCWR), so named because the
Marine Corps Commandant refused to use a catchy acronym like WAFS or
WAVES, began wearing the legendary and coveted Eagle, Globe and Anchor.

In 1943 the induction of
women into the Armed Forces and the debate over their roles finally
resulted in a minor victory for women of the WAAC. Both the term and role
"Auxiliary" were dropped, and those who were serving in the WAAC
were invited to enlist as members of the Army's new Women's Army Corps.
The majority of them did. The one setback was the 1943 merging of the WFTD
and WAFS into the new Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs) as a para-military
organization under the Civil Service. By the time legislation was
introduced in 1944 to militarize the WASPs, the need for pilots had
lessened and the WASPs were disbanded.

Speaking to the valiant
women who had served at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, on December 7,
1944, General Arnold stated: "The WASP have completed their mission.
Their job has been successful. But as is usual in war, the cost has been
heavy. Thirty-eight WASP have died while helping their country move toward
the moment of final victory. The Air Forces will long remember their
service and their final sacrifice."

Much like the "Hello
Girls" of a generation that had served in the previous war, the WASPs
were classified as members of the Civil Service, not the Army Air Force,
and were denied veterans status. Not until 1977 did Congress finally
recognize them as members of the military force that won World War II,
granting them status as veterans and authorizing them to wear the World
War II Victory Medal. That legislative victory was achieved in no small
part, thanks to the efforts of Bruce Arnold, son of the WWII Army Air
Force commander who had bid them thanks for their service back in 1944.

During World War II some
150,000 women served in the WAAC or WACs; 100,000 in the Navy's WAVES,
more than 1,000 in the WASPS and its predecessors, and nearly 20,000 in
the MCWR. The jobs they performed were generally moderately traditional
though their duties often put them into harms way and many paid for their
service with their lives. Through it all they proved they could provide an
important role in military service. Their credo might well have been best
echoed in a poster painted for he WAVES by Howard Baer. The annotation
reads: "If she's a Navy WAVE, then a woman's task may be anything
that a man's task may be, and it's a pretty good bet that she will handle
it efficiently."

While the future of the
WACs, WAVES and MCWR looked uncertain amid cutbacks when World War II
ended, their service had not gone unnoticed. On July 26, 1948, President
Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 proclaiming that "there
shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the
armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national
origin." Although the President's action that ended racial
segregation in the military forces did not mention "sex" or
"gender", one month earlier he did sign the Women's Armed
Services Integration Act opening the door for women to find careers not as
auxiliaries, but as full-fledged, sworn-in members of the Army, Navy,
Marine Corps, and newly created Air Force.

While the door opened for
women to serve in the Armed Forces in 1948, it opened only slightly. In
1949 legislation prohibited women with dependent children from military
service, promotions were capped, women were barred from combat roles, and
they were forbidden to command or have authority over even the lowest
ranking man.

During the Korean War
(1950-1953) nearly 125,000 women served in the military including members
of the Nurse Corps, WAC and WAVEs. Seventeen died while on active duty,
most in accidents or air crashes. During the Vietnam War 7,000 women in
uniform served in-country. Eight died in service including one by hostile
fire. Along the way they earned Distinguished Service Medals, Legion of
Merits, Air Medals, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts. As non-combatants
however, none since World War I received the Medal of Honor, Navy Cross,
or Silver Star.***
Furthermore, as is evident from the words of one male commander,
"women are not awarded the Soldier's Medal."

Slowly, in the midst of the
Vietnam War, things began to change. In 1967 the Women's Armed Services
Integration Act was modified by Public Law 90-130, eliminating the 2%
ceiling on the number of women who could serve in the military. At the
same time the cap on promotions above paygrade O-3 were removed and women
were granted eligibility to hold Flag/General Officer rank. In 1967 the
U.S. Air Force opened its ROTC program to women, to by followed by Army
ROTC opportunities in 1971. Also in 1971 the Air Force established a
policy to allow pregnant women to request a waiver of the automatic
discharge rule, which opened the door for women with dependent children to
enlist.

In 1972 Admiral Elmo
Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations, expanded Navy ROTC opportunity to
women, suspended restrictions on a woman's right to succeed to command in
the United States, authorized Naval Officers to be selected for the War
College, and expanded the occupational fields available for service,
including the opportunity for women to serve at sea aboard the U.S.S.
Sanctuary. In 1973 the Navy allowed women to serve on aviation duty in
non-combat aircraft, a policy shift that was adopted by the Army the
following year and by the U.S. Air Force in 1977.

In 1973 the U.S. Coast
Guard began enlisting women for regular active duty and two years later
invited them to enroll in the Coast Guard Academy. Under Public Law
94-106, in 1976 the remaining service academies (Army, Navy and Air Force)
were opened to women. By 1980 Enlisted Women became eligible for many
at-sea, shipboard assignments. In a span of only 13 years from 1967 to
1980, the available roles for women in military service moved forward in a
major way.

Among the heady advances
for military women during that period was an historic action on June 11,
1970. On that date a star was pinned to the uniform of Colonel Anna Mae
Hays, Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, as she became the first woman general
officer in any branch of service in history. Moments later Elizabeth P.
Hoisington, Director of the Women's Army Corps, was also promoted to the
rank of Brigadier General. Within a year the Director of Air Force Women,
Jeanne M. Holm, became the Air Force's first woman general officer. In
1972 Alene B. Duerk, Chief of the Navy Nurse Corps, received a spot
promotion to Rear Admiral (Lower Half). In 1978 Margaret Brewer became the
Marine Corps' first woman general.

Some of these women who
ascended to leadership were members of The Greatest Generation, having
served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. But among the ranks of women in
uniform was a new generation of leaders, women of the Defining Generation,
and they too would make history.

*For
years afterwards legislation was introduced into Congress to remedy
this slight, but the bills were always buried in committee. It took
one of the operators, Mearle Eagan Anderson, over fifty years of
persistence to secure legislation to award the operators veteran’s
status. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter signed a bill giving the
"Hello Girls" their deserved recognition as the first U.S.
Army veterans in history.

**Not
to be forgotten are the women who, beginning in 1942, were accepted
into service with the U.S. Coast Guard. They were called SPARs, an
acronym for the Coast Guard motto "Semper Paratus - Always
Ready".

***During
World War II Virginia Hall, a member of the Office of Strategic
Services, became and remains the only American woman since World War I
to receive the Distinguished Service Cross, awarded for her courageous
and dangerous services in the work of espionage. A French woman also
earned a Distinguished Service Cross in WWII.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
The authors extend our thanks to the following who granted personal
interviews for this work: Roger Donlon (MOH), Robin Moore,
Don Bendell, Jimmy Stanford, Vince Yrineo, Sammy L. Davis (MOH),
Linda Alvarado, Karen Offutt, Lieutenant General Carol Mutter, Sir
Edward Artis, General Colin L. Powell, Katharine Houghton, Adrian
Cronauer, Jan Scruggs, Delbert Schmeling, and Peter Lemon (MOH).Our thanks to the staff of the following who either wrote or
allowed reprint of their own works for this book: Dr.
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Don Bendell, Congressman Sam Farr,
Congressman Thomas Petri, Congressman Mike Honda, Congressman Jim
Walsh, Governor Jim Doyle, and Scott Baron.Our special thanks also to the staff of the following who provided
information and fact-checked the chapters related to their
subject: Staff of Senator John Kerry, Staff of (then) Senator
Hillary Clinton, Staff of Senator Jim Webb
A SPECIAL THANKS also to Dr. Marguerite Guzman Bouvard for his
assistance in writing and editing the entire section on the Role of
the Sexes.